IED'S: COMING TO A MALL NEAR YOU?

10/20/07 - MANILA, PHILIPPINES:

A powerful blast ripped through three floors of a shopping mall in the heart of Manila's financial district Friday, killing eight people and wounding about 130, authorities said.

DC (WASH POST):

The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI agree that the homemade explosive devices that have wreaked havoc in Iraq pose a rising threat to the United States. But lawmakers and first responders say the Bush administration has been slow to devise a strategy for countering the weapons and has not provided adequate money and training for a concerted national effort.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who told the Senate last month that such bombs are terrorists' "weapon of choice," said yesterday at a local meeting that President Bush will soon issue a blueprint for countering the threat of improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Chertoff's department said in a draft report on IEDs earlier this year that national efforts "lack strategic guidance, are sometimes insufficiently coordinated . . . and lack essential resources."

... U.S. authorities have long tracked the IED threat, since the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. But officials worry that Iraq -- where the explosives have killed or wounded more than 21,200 Americans -- has become a laboratory for bomb design, technologies and tactics that can be spread over the Internet.

... From the transit system bombings in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2005, to a disrupted Britain-based plot to smuggle liquid explosives onto transatlantic airliners in 2006, al-Qaeda-inspired cells may be importing that group's signature tactic of coordinated and spectacular attacks but using quickly assembled conventional weapons against softer targets, analysts said.

"As we saw in London and Glasgow, Scotland, in June, this trend has already begun," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said in August, citing the failed car-bomb attacks against a nightclub and an airport.

BTW: THE FIRST WTC ATTACK AND THE OK BOMBING BOTH HAD FILIPINO CONNECTIONS AND IRAQI CONNECTIONS...

ROUND UP AT MEMEORANDUM.